The Department of Human Communication Sciences, University of Sheffield wishes to recruit a Postdoctoral Associate for a fixed term 1 year appointment.
You will be an early career researcher with a PhD in developmental psychology/language research or a related field. Working within the Developmental Speech, Language and Literacy research cluster, you will play a key role within two active projects within the cluster. The two projects both focus upon language assessment for children in digital contexts. Within project one you will contribute directly to the extension or further development of the multilingual receptive vocabulary screener (e.g. item development); see
http://www.vocabularyapp.org/. For the second project, you will be assessing children with and without language difficulties, to evaluate the impact of modality: paper versus digital, on assessment performance.
The position will be co-supervised by Dr Jenny Thomson (
https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/hcs/staff/thomson) and Dr Silke Fricke (
https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/hcs/staff/fricke). The project is funded by a specific named legacy administered by the Heather van der Lely Foundation, with Dr. Hilary Gardner acting as project consultant. Anticipated start date: October 1st, 2018. For more information, please contact Jenny Thomson:
[email protected].
Candidate Requirements
You will have (or be expected to obtain) a PhD in psychology, speech science, linguistics, education or a related field. You should have experience of conducting assessments with children in school settings and confidence in interacting with digital devices such as tablets. You will have a strong knowledge of language development and familiarity with linguistic concepts including word frequency and age of acquisition. Also desirable is knowledge of multilingual and/or cross-linguistic language development. In addition to English, you may be a speaker or have knowledge of one or more of the following languages: Polish, Czech, Slovak, Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese, German, Turkish, Punjabi, Urdu, Welsh.
The successful candidate would need to travel to participating primary schools for data collection purposes.
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